emand your pardon!" was all that he could say, looking at
the curl upon her shoulder that seemed uncommon white against the
silk of her Indian shawl that veiled her form. She saw his gaze,
instinctively drew closer her screen, then reddened at her error in so
doing.

He had the woman there!

"Pardon!" he repeated. "It is ridiculous of me, but I have heard the
signals and the music more than once and wondered. I did not know"--he
smiled the smile of the _flaneur_--"I did not know it was, let me say,
Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus with his lyre restored from among the
constellations, and forgetting something of its old wonder. Madame, I
hope Orpheus will not en-rheum himself by his serenading."

Her lips parted slightly, her eyes chilled--an indescribable thing, but
a plain lesson for a man who knew her sex, and Count Victor, in that
haughty instinct of her flesh and eye, saw that here was not the
place for the approach and opening of flippant parlours in the Rue
Beautreillis.

"I fear I have not intruded for the first time," he went on, in
a different tone. "It must have been your chamber I somewhat
unceremoniously broke into last night. Till this moment the presence
of a lady in Doom Castle had not occurred to me--at least I had come to
consider the domestic was the only one of her sex we had here."

"It is easily explained," said the lady, losing some of her hauteur, and
showing a touch of eagerness to be set right in the stranger's eye.

"There is positively not the necessity," protested Count Victor,
realising a move gained, and delaying his withdrawal a moment longer.

"But you must understand that--" she went on.

Again he interrupted as courteously as he might. "The explanation is due
from me, madame: I protest," said he, and she pouted. It gave her a look
so bewitching, so much the aspect of a tempest bound in a cobweb, that
he was compelled to smile, and for the life of her she could not but
respond with a similar display. It seemed, when he saw her smile through
her clouds, that he had wandered blindly through the world till now.
France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its
thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little
account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the
same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the
dusks with mystery and surprise. The night piped from the vaults, the
crumbling walls hummed with the incessa